


Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirrors in the Mirror)

by LowkeeWB



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: As Canon-Friendly as I Could Make It, Cold Yui Hypothesis, Gen, POV Second Person, Precocious Protagonist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29646501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LowkeeWB/pseuds/LowkeeWB
Summary: Ikari Yui reflects on her life and the conditions that have taken her beyond the end of the world.
Kudos: 5





	Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirrors in the Mirror)

If there is one thing you know, Ikari Yui, it is the value of sacrifice. You are taught it from your first waking moments in your doomed world. Cut free from the failing body of your mother, you live the first month of your life under a glass dome. You can remember them telling your father that your chances of survival are small, even smaller than those of your mother. They underestimate you, just as many others will throughout your life.

As proof, who is it that finally emerges from the hospital, almost blinded by the daylight? It is you, Ikari Yui, carried by a father weakened by grief.

He will keep you at arms-length the rest of your life. You will never be sure why, but his example is instructive for you well into the future. The experience of loss shapes men into something different-- you observe the changes in him as the weeks press on. You are an infant, burdened by sleepiness and a weak body, but still you watch and remember. For some reason, Ikari Yui, this world cannot keep its secrets from you. You lay clear-eyed and quiet for the long years of your infancy, as the nurses take care of you and your father flees from your sight. You hear their words of pity from your caretakers and begin to understand them. More than that, you retain the memories of everything you experience.

Thus you learn the value of concealing your gift before you gain the ability to communicate it. How fortuitous.

You are doubly blessed. Your father is a man for whom the world has been opened and in which he rules-- if not as a king then as a prince. That makes you a princess then, with every secret of the Dead Sea scrolls as your birthright. Before he ever knows you understand them, your father has leaked SEELE’s plans to you. They are impossible to understand in the years you hear your father discuss them, but you will have plenty of time to process your eavesdropping later.

For the most part, you live a life of isolation. Except for your father and the carousel of nurses that are frequently hired and then discarded, you go unaccompanied by others in the white-walled expanse of his mansion. By the time you are walking and talking with reliability, you have no need for human companionship. For years, all there has been is a boundless sea of _you,_ Ikari Yui _,_ interrupted only by lessons with impersonal tutors or tense encounters with your father.

With all of the time to yourself, you turn yourself towards the mystery of your father and the meaning of his work. Instrumentality, you learn, is the fate towards which the world is being turned. By the age of seven, you have seen and heard enough of your father’s conversations with his peers to understand their intentions for the world, if not the mechanisms by which they will act upon it. You never question why you have been granted the singular ability to understand so much as such a young age-- you do not know how far beyond the others you soar. Indeed, you have been underestimated since birth.

That is true until you are registered in boarding school. Just as quickly as you made yourself adapt to the hollowed world of your father’s mansion, you apply yourself to the challenge of the crowded school, where there is not a single moment of true privacy.

You develop the ability to preserve the tranquility you need inside yourself. Your boundless ocean is confined into an inland sea, but one of impossible depth. Thus you can face the other girls around you with a smiling face and a naive affect without ever forgetting the apocalypse your father is seeking to implement.

You throw yourself into your studies, but make sure not to stand out too brightly. It is not easy, and you learn of betrayal and rejection, certain varietals of isolation that you find far more painful than the walled silence of your earliest years. You learn that not everyone loves you, and not everyone can follow your will, no matter how nicely you ask. This is another lesson you keep in mind.

Your adolescence is a confusing and chaotic period of growth. The less said about it, the better. It solidifies your understanding of the world and grants a pittance of wisdom. Small it may be, but is enough to understand what SEELE wants, and the pain they are running from. You come to recognize them for their true forms: men chasing escapism, even at the cost of self-destruction. Although you are unsure what must be done about it, you agree that you need the power to control your life, as your self has been your one and only companion.

A wish is granted when you are accepted to the bioengineering program at Kyoto University, one of your nation’s finest institutions. You have proved your worth to your father, and he confides in you certain elementary secrets that were known to you a lifetime ago. You act naive, as you have been taught, and pretend to be receptive to his shortsighted ideals.

It is that meeting with your father that convinces you of who you will be. The man who blinded himself out of grief and placed you in an absolute state of exception, the selfish one who let you become like a single drop of water falling from the selfish source of his bereavement. He prefers his brainchild after all, carries more hope and feeling for a scheme birthed from the minds of faceless men. And yet he is still shameless enough to embrace you as a daughter now that you have come to be convenient in his plans.

And so you have decided, Ikari Yui. If they wish to fashion all of mankind into an instrument, you will preempt their efforts before they will force it upon you and all mankind. Thus you choose to become the wrench in the works. SEELE will not have their way, and perhaps you may have your own.

But you cannot do it alone. And you cannot trust the caprice of the fanatics who swarm around SEELE, most of whom have willingly eroded themselves to pursue their misinterpreted hodgepodge of scripture and technological documentation. You must shape your own tools to disassemble a machine driving itself towards Armageddon. The men that will aid you will not be mindless followers, but willing partisans. Or at least that is how you envision it.

Professor Fuyutsuki is the first candidate, and the easiest for you to convince. You relate best to those who have lived alone, even if the Professor is of the type who only find it comfortable to exist as one, even as they hold wild dreams of being two, or three. He has let himself drift comfortably for years, only beginning to stir as he realizes his solitude might soon be beyond choice.

You know that you have entranced him from your first meeting. You have kept your mind sharp and your self controlled so that your external image is one of sober vivacity. It inspires irrational hopes in him, but Fuyutsuki is the sort of person genteel enough to accept companionship at any level, even when his desires are much greater. You know he will keep his flame lit over decades, especially once SEELE accomplishes the preliminary disaster that will enable their final work.

But, Ikari Yui, you will find that the creation of tools is not as simple as discovering diamonds in the rough. Certain scientific developments made during your university years have confirmed terrible suspicions: it is insufficient to only hold a number of poor isolated scientists in reserve for the battle ahead. You know there must be an additional soul fighting in the years ahead, and it must be your child.

And just as you begin to wonder where you might find a piece to solve this little puzzle, there appears Rokubungi Gendo. He’s already in graduate school when you first meet him, but he still refers to himself with the pronouns of a boy, not those of a man. _Boku_ he says, not _ore_. It is almost like he has been waiting for you in hibernation. When first you see him, he looks at you with the expression of an abused hound, his jaw down and with eyes wide and wary. He wears a smirk near permanently, as if he wants to provoke the next blow to come.

The first few times you meet Gendo, you are careful not to reveal too much, not to be too eager. For most who see him, he is nothing more than an uneasy presence on the periphery of the department, used for his labor and his intellect but ultimately rejected from the social world of his fellow scientists as an erratic loner.

You find that their rejection is not entirely without cause. Gendo is prone to periods of brittle silence, even in situations where it is just the two of you. He sits, hands clasped, and observes. For most, the silence of his gaze is unnerving. For you, it is almost welcome. It is a return to a time where you could truly be yourself, uncomplicated and without grand plans that involve the fate of humanity itself.

You find comfort in him, which eases your personal burden greatly: you already knew he would find comfort in you. He is a strange plant growing from the fertile seedbed of isolation, just as you are.

You can tell this on the first night with him, as he clings so dearly to you, shaking, almost sobbing to be held so close, to be accepted so completely. In the outside world, on his superficial surface, he affects a certain pride, as if he is the one man who needs no one else. If you weren’t here, he could go the rest of his life like that, challenging everyone around him to pierce through his barrier and have some impact on him.

But you have learned the secret to him, unlocked a gate that will never be fully closed again. The key was time and patience. He tried to scare you off with harsh words and threats, but you recognized those as defensive behaviors. When you gave him time, he reversed himself. In his own silly he way, he tried to make up for his initial rejection it by cleaving to you almost immediately. It really is unfortunate for him, because you are the one person who will hurt him more than anyone else ever can.

You are married before long, and the rumors everywhere are that Gendo sought to use you as a step to get closer to SEELE. Perhaps in another world, Gendo could have become another one of their drones, seeking to erase a painful past. In this world, he works only for you and your vision. They all think that he has taken your family name, but the truth is that it was given to him by you. He is yours, and wears his collar with a sense of pride as he rises in the ranks.

You know there is nothing you can do to prevent Second Impact. SEELE will have to pay a massive cost in money and personnel to create this new _tabula rasa_ , but their world will be a blank slate for you, too. Your odds of success in 15 years will be far better than your odds now. The purpose of you and all your other tools lies at the end of the world. Until then you will allow SEELE to think that they are being served by the key personnel of NERV.

And so, Ikari Yui, you let Second Impact happen. Gendo needs no extra encouragement to carry out his orders: he can be callous in a way you prefer not to be. He can cause a mass extinction event and not have a single muscle in his face change.

But you know that he holds you a little tighter in days following, as the floodwaters surge and the climate stagnates into endless summer days. Does he seem closer to tears when you lay a hand on his face? Is he truly the man for the job?  
  
In June of that chaotic year, Ikari Shinji makes his arrival. You produce this last tool with your body. You think of him as ‘tool’ in your mind, but you also know yourself by the same name: everything has been considered in terms of pure utility ever since you were a little child eavesdropping on your father. With the end of the world on the line, who would tolerate anything else?

And yet with Shinji you feel something distinct. He is a little warm and soft thing made of wrinkled skin and hunger, the antithesis of utility. And yet you come to find him dearer than all the rest. It is upon his shoulders the future will rest. You have set the stage for him and you will carry him further than he may ever know, but the ultimate results of all of your efforts is encapsulated in one infant.

One afternoon in Hakone, you do to him what you do to all the ones who love you. It is supposedly a routine experiment. In reality it is a ritual. Your father had been giving signs that his peers in SEELE suspected your rebellion. They saw the constellation of key personnel you assembled in Japan: all the lonely outcasts that allowed themselves to be set up like dominoes waiting for the fall.

You know Naoko and you know how her daughter is being raised-- you know them, and you know Gendo. You know Katsuragi’s daughter, too, because you knew her father. You were the master puppeteer for years, pulling strings to get them into position, but you were a little too hasty. With SEELE’s eyes upon you, it will be impossible to do anything more. You move your involvement into the next phase.

As you plan to take your position in the core, you know that Shinji is watching. He may not remember the next moments, but he will remember the feeling. It is that feeling that will protect him and drive him closer to you. And you in turn will reach out to him, your flesh, your blood, the poor thing. He will be lonely. Gendo will fall apart. But Shinji will develop his own strength. He must, or humanity will be erased without a single trace it ever existed.

And so you become nothing but a soul, disappearing into the core of EVA Unit 01. The true nature of your existence cannot now be described, but the experience of being disembodied is so negative that your resolve against SEELE becomes strengthened to the point of fanaticism. Time is barely perceived, replaced instead with uncontrollable emotion. Protectiveness, rage, victory, violence. It is as if he is a baby again, and you can feel him stir and kick as he develops, both of you not quite understanding the other. Still, you have the presence of mind to withhold your service at certain points, and then activate when it is needed.

That is why you are able to make your last hard decision. There is one last sacrifice that needs to be made. The strength of Ikari Shinji has grown a little too far, and the influence of Katsuragi’s orphan too potent. Shinji is a product of both you _and_ his father, after all. He wants to save Kyoko’s girl, or perhaps just his obsessive self-destructive attachment to her.

It is a dilemma without a true dilemma. If Unit 02 survives and Shinji’s psyche remains stable, Instrumentality will be squarely in the hands of SEELE and your life’s mission has failed. Through some ancillary sense of yours, you are aware of the entire process as Kyoko and her daughter are torn apart, and you must force yourself again and again not to act. At some point, Shinji finally calls you by your true identity-- he calls to his mother. Your body jolts into action, and you begin the process of Third Impact in accordance with your plans.

As you predicted, Shinji is like his father. His first action is to reject the world-- he chooses to eliminate the boundaries between all things, just as SEELE would wish. Yet he soon discovers he has not created a planet of calm and peaceful harmony-- he has created the cacophonous swirling mess of everything all the time. You reach out for him and show him the way out, and he struggles his way to the surface of Hell.

You have a few words for him. After all, he is your son. His success is your success, and by rejecting SEELE’s instrumentality, he has confirmed the value of human life. He will be fine, you know. He is your son.

Finally, you leave him with your eternal trust, and accept the position of honor you have prepared for yourself as the savior of humanity: you will drift on and on through space for all time. It is no burden: it is your just reward. For whom else would be suitable to become a new star, a constellation of One, other than a new goddess elevated by her own efforts? Born under ill omens and with everything human withheld from her, who else could have expected you to go as far as you have? Who now has become the last timeless being of the Earth, endlessly reflecting the ephemera of life into the void of eternity?

It is you, Ikari Yui.


End file.
